Dino Themed Acapulco Gold...

Fingolfen

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One of my early pedal builds was an Acapulco Gold clone using the Musikding kit with a pre-drilled enclosure. I figured it was high time to bring the pedal forward into the dino age... (there's something wrong with that, but I can't put my finger on it)... so here's a fun new "one knob" build with a dino-themed enclosure (... because who doesn't like dinosaurs!?!?!?).

SO FX - BFG - Acanthopholis Gold - 01.jpg

For this build, time I'm using a board laid out by South Obolon FX - the BFG. The South Obolon circuit has a couple of subtle modifications from the version I previously built. First it includes the LED brightness resistor right on the board itself. Second it includes a volume drop resistor. The standard Acapulco Gold pedal is very loud, and the standard setting is to put a 22K resistor in that slot (which is still plenty loud!). If you want to go with the original typhoon level volume, you simply put a jumper into that position. I used the original spec LM386N-4 op amps for this build. Otherwise the rest is just one film and a few electrolytic capacitors.

SO FX - BFG - Acanthopholis Gold - 02.jpg

This is only the second pedal I've built in a 1590B enclosure, and the wiring gets a little tight in the bottom half of the enclosure. Of course, part of the reason for the lack of space is I wanted maximum room for enclosure art. Like my Astrodon Physicist build, I didn't include room for a battery. I find that wiring up the DC jack before installing the stomp switch works best as the spacing is very tight, and I want to continue to use heat shrink tubing over the connections. I may start adding some "cable management" ties just to keep everything a bit neater on future builds.

SO FX - BFG - Acanthopholis Gold - 03.jpg


So what's a Steggo build without an appropriate dinosaur enclosure? According to Wikipedia, the "Acanthopholis (meaning "spiny scales") is a genus of ankylosaurian dinosaur in the family Nodosauridae that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period of England." The beginning of the dinosaur's name was also close enouch to Acapulco for people to get the joke, and I happened to have some really cool licensed art of one. I combined some of the design tricks I'd used on previous Boss and EQD clones with a killer knob for the final enclosure.

I've built a couple of these, one prototype and this full version. The prototype jumpered the volume reducing resistor, while this one included it. The addition of the volume resistor doesn't seem to hamper the pedal much, though I haven't tried to run a max volume test on both in series yet. The sound is pure Acapulco Gold, and this new version will generally replace my previous build on the pedal board going forward.

Original blog entry: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/11/more-deja-vu-truly-steggo-acapulco-gold.html
 
That looks awesome. Ankylosaurus is my favorite kind of dinosaur. I have an AG I built on vero that I never ended up boxing up because I was going to go back and put a distortion control in. I may need to revisit it.
 
Sweet build as always! Interesting about the volume mod on the BFG. Where does the volume drop resistor go?
Before the 4n7? I need to dig mine out and mess with it some. I built mine as a dual board combo with an SHO booster......like the El Sol needed to be boosted right? hahaha...

Mine was a totally messed up early attempt at self painted enclosure and I've been meaning to re-visit it to give it a new paint job. You've got me thinking about sneaking a mod onto the El Sol board and tame that wall shaking volume a bit. Sounds like a perfect application for a "Trimmit" board.
 
Sweet build as always! Interesting about the volume mod on the BFG. Where does the volume drop resistor go?
Before the 4n7? I need to dig mine out and mess with it some. I built mine as a dual board combo with an SHO booster......like the El Sol needed to be boosted right? hahaha...

Mine was a totally messed up early attempt at self painted enclosure and I've been meaning to re-visit it to give it a new paint job. You've got me thinking about sneaking a mod onto the El Sol board and tame that wall shaking volume a bit. Sounds like a perfect application for a "Trimmit" board.
The volume drop resistor is right before the volume pot after the 1uF cap.
 
The volume drop resistor is right before the volume pot after the 1uF cap.
Sweet, sounds like it should be easy enough to just straddle the input leg of the volume pot and the 1uf Cap with say a 25k trimpot. Hmmm, may need to lift one of the legs of the cap to put the trimmer on top of the board.....thinking out loud here.....
 
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